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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Hospitality & Society - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013
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Working in the ‘Bleak House’ – an autoethnographic study of ethnic segmentation, precarization and informalization in the London hotel industry
More LessAbstractDuring the past three decades, the traditional model of the welfare state in advanced economies has been replaced successively by the neo-liberal economic and political model. As a result, global labour markets today are extensively characterized by precariousness, instability, insecurity, vulnerability, risk and, of course, increased exploitation. However, these processes have not affected all segments of the population or all sectors of the economy equally severely. Some groups and individuals, and certain sectors, have been affected worse and earlier than others. This article attempts to demonstrate this through a case study of labour conditions in the London hotel industry in the mid-1980s. Using the author’s personal experience as an empirical point of departure, the article demonstrates how the precarious nature of the work, ethnic segmentation and informal economic arrangements that dominated the London hotel industry at that time were early signs of what were going to become the key characteristics of most economic sectors not only in London and the United Kingdom, but – today – globally.
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‘Someone to watch over me’: Surveillance within a UK casino
Authors: Yvonne Guerrier and Guy BohaneAbstractMost studies of casinos have emphasized the pervasiveness of surveillance but they have generally focused on staff responses to being monitored. Given that surveillance is about care as well as about control, this article argues that surveillance is necessary in order to provide a safe environment in which customers can engage in the risky activity of gambling. The role of staff is to watch customers and each other, as well as to be watched over. The article uses a case study of a casino in a UK city to explore surveillance as work. Despite the presence of cameras and recording equipment, we argue that surveillance is primarily an embodied process of people watching people. We explore the different reasons that staff are required to watch customers: in order to respond to their needs, in order to police their behaviour to prevent illegal or deviant acts and in order to provide support and care if gambling behaviour is becoming problematic. We explore how staff learn what to look out for and how and when they intervene. Finally we argue that ‘surveillance work’ is relevant in a range of hospitality settings as hospitality organizations are increasingly required by government to take responsibility for the ‘policing’ of customers on their premises.
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Captivity and hospitality in the New Americas
More LessAbstractThis article discusses the languages of hospitality as influential in the construction of nationhood. Concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ have all contributed towards the understanding of America as a boundary-enforced country, outlining the mapping and bordering of empire expansion in the New World. The relationship of hospitality with nation building manufactures a sense of entitlement, community and national identity among its citizens. In this context, hospitality links home and comfort to the building of a nation and continent, yet also in a more ominous fashion, implies the demarcation of boundaries, the violent hostility of host and homelands and implied hostility directed towards external factors threatening the conceptual and geographical borders of home. This article examines nineteenth-century captivity narratives by Mary Jemison and Susannah Johnson to further understand the negotiating process of home and visitor relationships between the Anglo European settlers and the Amerindians.
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Taste: A bloodless revolution
More LessAbstractThe public debates about taste arrived in the public domain during the eighteenth century although the practice of creating social divisions through the discipline of rules of etiquette has had many precedents. The consumer age is distinguished by a trade in taste: conspicuous consumption becomes a new social mode. Individuals consumed goods and services in order to demonstrate their capacity to consume. Consumption was not limited by need but became an expression of taste that in turn reflected social mobility and wealth. The training of taste was a new commodity with the democratization of consumption and with the publication of books on household protocols and the rules of conduct at social events. The churning of distinctions through the ‘trickle down’ and the ‘springing up’ of changes in style becomes intertwined with social mobility and industrial modernity which, in turn, produces a divorce between fashion and taste. A further consequence is that being fashionable is increasingly a sign of the lack of taste, although it was not always so.
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Reviews
Authors: Jeffrey P. Miller, Steven Schouten and Alan ClarkeAbstractDishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience, Robert Appelbaum (2011) London: Reaktion Books, 285 pp., ISBN: 978-1-86189-807-4 (hbk), £19.95
Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920, Andrew P. Haley (2011) Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 356 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8078-3474-9 (hbk), £33.20.
Marketing in Food, Hospitality, Tourism & Events: A Critical Approach, Richard Tresidder and Craig Hirst (2012) Oxford: Goodfellows Publishing, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-1-906884-22-2 (pbk), £29.99
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